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OAXACA: A Fiesta of the SensesOaxaca is considered the culinary capital of Mexico and with good reason: tamales, mole, tortillas and quesadillas are just some of the delicacies awaiting visitors.My first impression of Oaxaca was the aroma of corn tortillas. Though it was nearly midnight by the time my fiancé and I arrived – exhausted and a little woozy from the six-and-a-half-hour bus ride through steep and winding mountains from Mexico City – the scent caught our attention. The tortillas were grilling on a metal barrel over a wood fire at a busy street stand squeezed between parked cars just outside our hotel’s door. As they ate, the patrons sat enthralled with the soap opera on a TV perched on a small shelf under the stand’s corrugated metal roof. We took a seat on the curb alongside the others and savored warm, crispy quesadillas with stringy cheese, squash flowers and a single epazote leaf pressed into the middle. As we discovered over the next two weeks, food is central to Oaxacan culture. In fact, the Oaxaca Valley was one of the first areas of plant cultivation in the Americas, when nomadic groups decided to trade their bows for hoes and settled down to farming. Gourds, beans and corn were farmed 9,000 years ago, archaeologists say. But the culinary breakthroughs did not end there. Chocolate originated in this area and is still produced by a string of chocolaterías on Calle Mina, following a simple recipe that combines cacao, sugar, cinnamon and almonds. It is then drunk as ordinary hot chocolate, as champurrado, hot chocolate thickened with atole (corn gruel) and flavored with piloncillo (cane sugar) and anis seeds, or as tejate, cold chocolate mixed with atole and cocoa flowers. It’s also stirred together with chilies, sesame seeds, raisins, garlic, cinnamon and about 20 other ingredients into a mole negro, the most famous of the seven varieties of this Mexican sauce. Other typical dishes include tlayudas (large tortillas with various toppings), tamales oaxaqueños (tamales baked in plantain leaf) and chili-sautéed grasshoppers. To wash it all down, Oaxacans invented mescal, as well as the worm salt often used to spice the drink. After so much history, food is not mere sustenance in Oaxaca, but a cultural element rich in meaning. Tejate, for example, is similar to the cacahuatl drunk by the Aztec upper class. Meanwhile, a centuries-old recipe for mescal involves distillation with a raw chicken, which is then taken to the family’s home altar. And though (thankfully) not on any menus we saw, we heard rumors that in one town, special funeral tamales are cooked in water used to wash the feet of the deceased. As many people still produce their own food, dig their own potatoes, grind their own corn and kill their own chickens, the rituals of life and death are intimately entwined with the day to day. |
